Testing Strategies To Develop a Mucosal T Cell Inducing Vaccine for HIV-1

Despite numerous efforts, HIV vaccine is still not available. Because HIV Envelop protein varies among subtypes and isolates, it is impossible for one vaccine against HIV Env to induce neutralizing antibodies against all subtypes and isolates. Previous vaccine attempts inducing HIV-specific CD4+ T cells have even been shown to enhance the HIV infection because HIV preferentially infects activated CD4+ T cells. It is known that CD8+ cytotoxic T cells (CTLs) play an important role in controlling HIV infections. We hypothesize that a vaccine inducing only CD8+ CTLs but not CD4+ T cells will be effective in preventing HIV infections. Thus, we plan to design minigenes expressing only 9 amino acid long HIV Gag/Env CTL epitopes but not CD4+ T cell epitopes as the vaccine target antigens. As most of HIV infections occurs mucosally, we will use papillomavirus like particles (PV VLP) as a mucosal vector. We will make papilloma pseudovirus (PV VLPs packaged with plasmid expressing HIV CTL epitopes) as the vaccine.